New Research Finds that IT and Security Teams Would Need to Devote
305 Hours Each Week to Investigate and Mitigate All of These Email
Threats; New ROI Calculator Helps Assess Risk Level and Provides Tips to
Manage Threats

July 12, 2017 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

BELMONT, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GreatHorn,
the cybersecurity solution for cloud communication platforms, today
announced the results of their original research, “The
Cloud Email Security Challenge: Closing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap
Through Automation.” The company analyzed more than 3.5 terabytes of
data - over 373 million corporate emails - from its proprietary data
cloud to gain insights into the sheer volume of email threats facing
enterprises and the role of automated tools in helping them keep up with
that challenge. GreatHorn found that the average enterprise receives
3,680 messages containing threat characteristics that require review,
investigation and (if applicable) remediation per week. Without
automated tools, the company estimates that task would take a security
team roughly 305 hours to complete.

GreatHorn analyzed anonymized information from its data cloud and found
that 0.016% of all corporate emails contained threat characteristics.
Combine this statistic alongside a few more facts: the average Fortune
500 company has 50,000
employees, each receiving roughly 460 emails per week which equates
to more than 23 million communications generated. GreatHorn used this
data to create a risk profile and identify the types of attacks cyber
criminals utilize as well as the volume. Given this environment,
GreatHorn found that Fortune 500 companies can expect to experience
1,380 direct spoof attacks, 460 display name spoofs, 560 emails with
"W2" or "Wire Transfer" included, 230 domain lookalikes and 1,150
authentication risks on a weekly basis.

While all of these emails aren't necessarily malicious, they do have
traits that require an IT analyst’s attention for approximately five
minutes; furthermore, if an email is malicious, the amount of
time required to investigate and remediate the threat could be much
higher. This many email threats would take roughly 305 hours to properly
review and remediate per week; a task made even more difficult by the
fact that enterprise IT and information teams almost always find
themselves pushing against resource limitations. Frost & Sullivan’s Global
Information Security Workforce Study shows that this environment
will persist as the analyst firm predicts the cybersecurity workforce
gap will reach 1.8 million by 2022.

“Our research shows that it is impossible for security teams to detect,
analyze and respond to every suspicious email their organization
receives,” said GreatHorn CEO Kevin O’Brien. “Without the ability to
hire qualified cybersecurity expertise, automation must become a bigger
part of the equation to help enterprises stay ahead of cybercriminals.
Automation reduces the workload on IT and security teams by
programmatically identifying and addressing threats based on preset
policies.”

GreatHorn provides enterprises with comprehensive, cloud-native
protection against message-based threats, driven by machine learning and
automated response capabilities. Businesses are increasingly adopting
cloud-based communication platforms such as Office 365, Google G Suite
and Slack because of their enhanced collaboration capabilities. However,
hackers view these platforms’ features as a major opportunity and are
utilizing sophisticated low-volume, highly targeted attacks to fool
employees into providing them with access to critical data. GreatHorn
Inbound Email Security platform uniquely provides the ability to
identify and shut down these attacks before damage occurs, without the
risk of a traditional network routing solution or the limitations of
perimeter blocking.

In addition, GreatHorn today unveiled its Email
Security Automation ROI Calculator, an easy-to-use tool that helps
companies assess their risk level while providing recommendations on
reducing costs and managing resources associated with mitigating email
threats. Based on the specific size of a company, size of IT team and
average security staff salary information, GreatHorn will provide
businesses with the number of email threats facing similar
organizations, the time necessary to mitigate the threats, the number of
employees to properly handle these efforts and the estimated annual cost
of manual cybersecurity protection versus an automated tool.

About GreatHornGreatHorn is the cybersecurity solution for
cloud communication platforms. The company’s flagship product is the
only solution that can automatically detect and remediate targeted
social engineering attacks in today’s leading communication systems
including Google Apps, Office 365 and Slack. With its proprietary
dataset built from hundreds of millions of uniquely analyzed threats,
GreatHorn combines the intelligence, fidelity, and precision necessary
to prevent attacks from becoming breaches. For more information on the
company, visit www.GreatHorn.com
or you can follow GreatHorn on LinkedIn,
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